Somatic Psychotherapy, Trauma treatment EMDR, Berkeley/Oakland

Welcome to my practice!

As a clinician, I practice integrative, somatic, holistic trauma therapy, tailored to meet your needs and context. I am adept with a number of theoretical orientations and modalities, and work comprehensively with most issues.

I also practice somatically oriented psychodynamic psychotherapy where we explore attachment, internalized family systems, and epigenetic/intergenerational patterns.

What I understand from many years as a clinician, seeing thousands of people in therapy, as well as from teaching and supervising countless clinicians in training, and of course my own experience doing my own work, is that we are fundamentally whole in nature. Yet, over the course of our lives we have accumulated experiences that we cannot digest or understand, and our relationship with these events disrupts our relationship with our own wholeness, balance, sense of purpose and meaning.

This often goes back generations. Over time, we become increasingly uncomfortable with ourselves because we are increasingly disconnected from ourselves.

For a therapy to be truly healing, and transformational, we have to find a tangible connection to that wholeness we originate from. This discovery begins with connection to the body.

BREEMA, the primary somatic approach I use in therapy, guides us via the instinctive wisdom of the body, bypassing the associative and fragmented conditioning of the mind, to connect with ourselves in an experience of increasing cohesiveness that begins with connection between body and mind.

" Don't fight sickness, nurture vitality,

then let vitality take care of the sickness."

from Breema: Essence of Harmonious Life, by Jon Schreiber

This basic tenant of Breema expresses an underlying understanding that every aspect of life is inherently connected to a bigger picture~ every cell connected to and included in a larger body, and that all imbalance and disharmony can be addressed by understanding what is vital and supporting that. This is where we will begin in our work together.

I trained in Breema at the Breema Center in Oakland; Gestalt, Body-Centered, and Somatic Therapy at Esalen Institute; EMDR with Philip Mansfield at JFK University; Psychodynamic and Counseling Psychology at Berkeley’s Wright Institute, and group therapy at both Esalen Institute and at the New Bridge Foundation. I've trained and worked for many years in both inpatient and outpatient behavioral health institutions, and several private practice and community health settings.

Formerly a program director at the New Bridge Foundation’s residential behavioral health treatment program in Berkeley, CA, and a primary therapist at Bayside Marin’s behavioral health outpatient treatment program in San Rafael, CA, I incorporated BREEMA, somatic therapy and body centered meditation into the group therapy treatment curriculum with great success; working primarily with active duty veterans, young adults and their families, couples, recovering professionals, first responders, formerly incarcerated men and women reclaiming their lives, and clients with co-occurring mental health and substance abuse issues. I also incorporated these principles into my training and supervision with my staff team at New Bridge. It was here that I discovered the body is as indispensable to the therapeutic process as it is in navigating daily life.

Currently I am a clinician, in an integrative wellness practice at the Breema Clinic in Oakland, and adjunct faculty at CIIS graduate psychology programs in San Francisco. Along with several colleagues, I have recently launched Blackbird Institute in Oakland CA, where we work training and offering clinical supervision to psychotherapy associates interested in treating trauma through a developmental, somatic, evolutionary, and transpersonal lens. I so look forward to our time together and to supporting you on your journey to become increasingly and lovingly yourself!

Team